day three: why live?

Maybe life has a purpose. Maybe our life has a purpose. What might come of just wondering and mulling about that possibility?

We can rush around and do
what we've always done.

Or, we can take a breath,
or a walk,
or have a deep talk,
or meditate,
or write,
or listen to sweet music

And tune in
to
What is our life for?

That's a nice game
for today.

More than a game.

And following our breathing and sensing arms and legs
while
listening
for our answer,
that would make
it more like a game.

Or not.

But staying present underneath the question,
that will help us stay sane,
and come to a far more
real answer,
if there is one.

And maybe we are searching for a
direction,
not specifics.

Or maybe the details are clear.

Either way:
be present
and enjoy
the discovery.

Be present
and enjoy
the discovery. This is the way
in movement,
emotion,
spirit,
thinking.

Or, one of the ways.

Good.

Day Two: Arms and Legs of Our Lives

We walk about on two legs. We reach out into the world with two arms, hands at the end. Might our life be more present if we were sensing our arms and legs and hands and feet as we went about our day?

Can we sense our arms and legs while sensing our breathing and being present?

That's the game for today.

Hard?

Sure.

And being awake is pretty amazing. Give it a go and see what life opens up for you.

Hands are handy. Fingers are amazing. Sense from shoulder blade out to fingers while you are walking, talking, reading, work.

Hard, and very wow.

Feet hold us up, often are forgotten, we can sense them, and the toes even sometimes and sense all the way up to our hip sockets. This is a lot of us. This is a lot of very concrete "paying attention" to ourselves.

This can work wonders for wanting "attention" from others.

And arms and legs and fingers and toes, what a lot of awaring practice this can be.

Work pleasurably hard. Laugh when you forget, find lots of pleasure and curiosity when you succeed.

This is just you, in this moment, breathing and having these two wonderful arms, two wonderful hands, two wonderful legs, two wonderful feet. (Most of us, and to realize that all don't make the sensing and waking to ourselves all the more precious, don't you think?)

Again? Yes. DAY ONE: Breathing, Awaring, Living, Yes!

We breathe all the time. We can be aware of our breathing. We can be aware of the difference being aware of our breathing makes. We can be aware of this action of ‘awaring,’ and get a sense of how central that is to being human.

As long as we are alive, we are breathing. We are breathing and we can know this, or not know this.

We have a brain that learns by noticing differences.

We have an awareness that wakes up when we return to being aware of life as it is, right now.

We have the ability to wake up to the reality that we haven’t been living in the now, over the last bit of our lives.

This is all good, great, wonderful amazing.



This book is an idea, a series of ideas and adventures and possibilities: ways of exploring a waking and vital and amusing and pleasure and love filled life. You might enjoy it.


There are 108 practices/ activities/ meditations/ games / things to try/ experiments, maybe to be done over 108 days.


Here’s day one’s:

Today’s game, what is the difference we can notice when we remember, follow and sense our breathing.


A whole lot of this 108 day journey will be about “sensing” ourselves while we go about “everyday” life, which is in itself a bit of an amazing miracle. And when we “sense” ourselves, we seem to more deeply and immediately connect with our being aliveness, whatever that is. An experience, surely, beyond words.


“Sensing” means feeling ourselves from the inside, as if our awareness were a hand. You can sense the inside of your hand, or the top of your neck, or the back of your left leg, or your right ankle. Or shift: sense your right big toe and your left thumb, and then your breathing and then your left foot.

The YOU inside you has the ability to move your awareness around and sense different parts of yourself.

Sensing.

This is the word for feeling ourselves physically. Can you sense right now where your right arm is, and the shape of it and the feel of it from the inside and outside, the bones and muscles and skin and aliveness of your arm?

Now sense your left arm.

How did you make that switch?

The YOU of you did it, is my idea.

And YOU are the one I am inviting on this 108 day journey of discovery.

Please take “time” today to sense yourself, in all sorts of ways. Take time away from, or in addition to scurrying down all the habitual grooves of thought, talk and behavior. Time away, or underneath to come back to breathing in, breathing out, and the sensation, the “sensing” in yourself as you do this.

Obviously this can change your whole life.

Notice, and notice again, the change when we return to awaring and sensing your breathing.

What does awaring mean?

Experience this for yourself. Discover. Play around. This is YOU. The game is waking up to our lives.

A good game, I think. What you discover will be what you discover.

day 108: this is the beginning

This is the beginning

Every day offers you hundreds of chances to be yourself, to be alive in the moment, to learn something new, to sense yourself deeply, to enjoy other people, to do things you like and love to do.

There is a Tolstoy fable/ story toward answering the question: What is the best time? Who is the best person for you?
The answer: NOW.
Whoever you are with.

See if this day can be one more start toward realizing and living and loving your life that way.

Possible wonders:

To be present.

To love what is in front of you.

To love what is arising inside you.

To calm and quiet the thinking by sensing more.

To follow the breathing.

To love whomever you are around.

To love yourself.

To love life.

To be empty and present and let that be a worldless / wordless “something” like love.

Good.

Good.

day 107, this is my life

This is my life

Yes, we’ve been here before, and we are always here.

This is your life.

What do you love? Is there a way of loving more people and parts of yourself and life today?

This is my life.

How much can I savor and enjoy and spread happiness today.

This is my life?

What’s next?

Can I stay excited and enthusiastic about the possibilities of what could be next?

And we do get tired. And not so enthusiastic at times, and this is our life at these times.

To be present to tiredness: this is my life.


To be present to our breathing: this is my life.

To be present to not knowing what is coming next: this is my life.

To be present to following each breath: this is my life.

Ten fingers, ten toes, belly eyes ears nose: this is my life.

Reading this book: this is my life.

Putting down this book: this is my life.


Good.

day106: Up and down and twisting and awaring, 5 lines to boot

Moving all ways and sensing our five lines

Here’s one way to get the spine, your spine, going through all it’s possibilities.

Stand, easily and tap your heels for a warm up.

Smile and look outside yourself and find three or five things to like about what you see.

Then take your right hand down along your left leg toward your left shoe. Fold and twist a bit as you get smaller and smaller and lower and lower.

Now unfurl, bringing your hand up in front of your chest and then on up toward the sky or ceiling on your right side, look up and watch it, and twist to the right with your hand and body.

When you are as far as you can go here, stay and enjoy and then begin side bending to the right and the left in this position/

Don’t worry if this isn’t obvious reading it on the page. Go piece by piece and really enjoy this.

Find different ways to breathe as you do this.

After many times, rest.


Then go left hand down, and up and twist and arch and side bend.

You’ll get it.

Go about the rest of your day full of spine and possibility.


And be of good cheer.

Why not, it’s your life.

day 105 sitting and side bending, spine awakening, spine fun

Sitting and side bending.

Sit comfortably on the front edge of a chair. Breathe easily and do just very slightly a rounding and arching of your spine, to feel your pelvis more clearly on the chair, and the lengthening of your back when you arch.

Come to a sitting position with a slight arch, and your belly a bit forward and soft and free. Breathe in and out a number of times this way, and then interlace your fingers and bring your hands behind your head.

Now, keeping your nose pointing forward, tilt to the right, so your left elbow goes toward the sky/ ceiling and the right elbow comes toward your right hip. Notice what is happening with the weight on your pelvis. Is it going to your right “sit bone” or your left? Probably the right.

Now learn how to do this: as you tilt your head and elbow directly to the right, raise you right hip toward the right elbow, as they come closer, and allow your weight to shift to the left side of your pelvis.

Do this many times. “Easily.” And then rest.

Now, bring interlace your hands the “non-habitual” way, bring them behind your head, and tilt to the left. Two ways: first, shifting your weight left as you tilt, and then, many times, shifting the weight on your pelvis to the right. Feel the shape of your spine as you do this. Many times. Rest.



For today, play with remembering your spine and playing with the ways the spine, the ways your spine moves.

Folding and coming into a ball.

Arching and lengthening and rising to the sky.

Twisting.

Side bending.


See if you can discover a movement that will combine them all.

day 104: slowing down

Go slow. Go slowly

We’ve done this before, and it’s getting near the end of our one hundred and eight days and going slow is one of the great helpers on the road to a waking life. Slowing down enough to put our awareness on sensing ourselves. Slowing down enough to know we are breathing. Slowing down enough to pull out a pad of paper and “do the Work,’ when our thoughts want to rush us into madness.

Be it madness of believing in nonsense, or madness of anger at ourselves or others. What if we slowed in the middle of emotional nonsense and sensed ourselves and took a deep breath and knew we were breathing and then began to sense ourselves

Would life begin to make more sense then? Probably.

Would we be able to act from the moment rather than react from something like a robot in our patterns of behavior?

Probably.

The busy-ness of life and the business of life. They happen. We don’t have to believe in them. Somewhere inside we can have our attention on real sensation, and real light and real sound.

Right now real sensing and real light and real sound.

Good.


Clocks and time pressure want to pull us away from our real lives. We don’t need to go on vacation, or stay in a trance, or meditate in solitude all day.

But we can make all of the day, this day, any day, every day, our meditation.

We can refuse to take the busy-ness personally.

We could be present to our breathing and your five lines and find something slow and sweet and amusing about each moment we are in.

Slowing down to recapture our selves in our lives in this moment, that seems like a fine way to spend the day, yes?

day 103 , emotions as actions, so let's move toward free

this picture is New Year's Day, a bunch of us nuts went in the lake for about 20 seconds

Emotional freedom

Let’s play with options.

Let’s play with feelings.

Take someone you still aren’t that crazy about. Find some things “wrong” with them.

Imagine doing the Work, the four questions, the turn around. Maybe even do the Work.

But here’s the deal: play with your feelings toward them.

Try out anger, and fear, and amusement, and enjoyment, and curiosity, and love, and distain, and admiration, and respect, and scorn, and loathing, and being charmed by them.

Give yourself emotional elbow room.

You aren’t a robot, but people often have such stuck reactions to people.

Be free.

Be complicated.

Enjoy your options of feelings for lots of people today.

Valentines to you, day 102: Write yourself a Love Letter

Loving life, loving you

Send yourself a love letter. Think of things and aspects you love and enjoy and admire about other people.

Find them all in yourself.

In the letter today, write about how much you like these parts of yourself.

In your day today look around and enjoy seeing in others wonderful characteristics, and see that these are part of you, too.

Write paragraphs alternating: one paragraph written with your right hand, one with your left. This way, no matter what your favorite: both sides of your brain will get to write sweet words of you to you.



Praise yourself for little things, and for big things. Praise and love yourself for wonderful things you do and the not so wonderful.


Remember the Jesus, love your enemies, stuff: Love your not so great parts, and send, in words, paragraphs of love to yourself for your mistakes, or your bad days, as well as your learning and your good days.


Try to be the perfect lover, all accepting parent, total good friend, happy buddy in this letter. Treat this letter like the most wonderful possible Valentine’s card / letter you can send yourself.

P.S. If you want to, make a loving collage for yourself, too.

Think loving thoughts to yourself all day as well, and let them spill over to others, if you are so inclined. But keep plenty for you. Plenty, amusement, affection, love and appreciation, of you, all for you.

Good.

day 101: having fun in five line nowness, belly, eyes, ears nose

Ten fingers, ten toes,

Ten fingers, can we sense them now? Ten toes, and that leads to sensing our whole legs.

Two legs above ten toes.


Belly.

Eyes. Ears.

Nose.


Ten fingers and our arms.

Ten toes and our legs.

Belly, and our breathing.

And our spine. Let’s make it five lines for the sweetness of reality of being in our human body.

Eyes to see. In head at the top of that spine.
Ah yes.

Ears to hear.

Nose on our head, top of the spine, more breathing.


Ten fingers, ten toes, belly eyes ears nose.

And anything and everything we’d like to fill in and sense and enjoy.

Today.

Yes.

day 100, a review for your recalling and re-gathering

Some sort of re-view

Get a pencil and paper, and without looking at the book, or referring to anything else, write down some of the activities you’ve done so far and have enjoyed.

Then skim through the book and jot down some more that you’ve enjoyed and learned something from.

Then pick one or two to play with again today.

And give yourself the idea that when 108 days are up, every day you can repeat and re-visit and re-view and re-play and re-learn from this bundle of possibilities.



And you can make up your own adventure and activities for the day.


For today, though, pick one or two of the past ones and go there again. Enjoy.

99: Having a Good time with variation from NOw

buffalo meat won't you come out to eat, complete with egg yolk


Changing in the present

The past can’t change.

The present can.

Often we do things exactly the way we’ve always done them.

We had a day, a ways back as part of the 108 days, of trying “something new under the sun.”

Today, pay attention to whether or not you are in the present.

When you get there, pause and breathe and just enjoy “being.”

And from that being, think of options.

Options about WHAT you could do next.

And options about HOW you could do next whatever you are going to do.

So, you finish your breakfast, and pause. You could brush your teeth, read the paper a little, take a walk, make a short phone call.

The walk could be fast, a new route, the usual route, slow, on the insides of your feet, skipping, pigeon toed, bow legged, singing, following your breathing, counting your breathes, counting your steps.

Don’t worry about what you decide.

Just play with the possibilities and stay present to how that is all going.

All day.

Good.

98: Getting it Straight

Getting it straight: we don’t run the show

Think of someone who has done you some “wrong.” In the past.

It is over.

Think of the statistical probability of your changing what they did in the past.

Think now, in a wishing and wanting and even whining sort of way, how “it” should have been different, how they should have been different, how Reality should have been different.

Wish/ want/ whine really hard.

Notice if anything has changed about the past.


Notice (as per question #3 in the Katie work, our reactions when we attach to the belief) how all that wishing and wanting the past to be different has made us feel.


Now, think of the same situation, as if it is over. As if we have zero chance of changing it. Consider not thinking about wanting the past to be different. Do this and bring your attention back to now, which is….? Sense, look, listen.

Feel how free this feels.

Notice how you can do something in the present, stand up, sit down, pay attention to breathing, sing a song, go for a walk.

And notice how all these things might be totally neglected if you are back trying to “fix” the unchanging past.


So, here’s today’s game: when the “past should have been different” thoughts come up, stop and realize it. Maybe even write them down. And then grunt and groan and strain and see if the past changes. If not, come on back to the present and see what is here for you.

Right now.

Day 97: rotation an easy way: on our backs for learning's sake

photo from my daughter's trip to Turkey

Rotation, lying on our back, easy, good, smart

Lie on your back, or some comfortable and firm surface. Bring your left foot to standing (= foot on ground, knee up).

Press your left foot into the ground, and rotate your pelvis to the right while arching your back. Do this the usual “many times.” Each time as if new. Each time feel more of yourself.

Rest.

Put your arms across each other, with your hands resting on your opposite shoulder. As above, press your left foot, rotate and arch your back. Add on, three times rotate the shoulders “with” the twisting to the right, and the next three rotate your shoulders to the left as your hips rotate to the right, back and forth, “many times.”

Rest.

Bring your head into the fun. Do all the above, and have your head rotating, “easily” in the opposite way of your shoulders.

Rest.

If you want to add on the eyes opposite your head, be my guest.

Rest.

Go slow, and feel all the differences each time you add on more complexity.

In the end, go back to the simple arching and twisting. Just push through your left foot and feel the twist and arch in your back. Notice the difference. Then lie quietly and notice the difference side to side.

Then stand and feel differences side to side in your walking, and standing and maybe even breathing.


If you’d like to repeat the entire sequence on the other time a little later in the day, or right before going to bed, that would be interesting and useful, most likely.

For today, notice when you rotate, and have some fun playing with pelvis, ribs, head and eyes in this.

day 96: Meditation, a beginning or a continuing

Meditation, a beginning.

For centuries people have used “meditation” to come to a quieter place inside, to renew themselves, to practice and enjoy the pure experience of being present.

For probably as long as there has been people, people have sat down and stopped and watched the stars, or a faraway river (or a near one), or just let their minds drift in a sort of a reverie. Or they let and nudge their minds toward quietness. Or towards “the present.”

Meditation is a way of actively making the decision to do little, to do less, to stop the rushing and bustle of the everyday life. And inside, meditation can be very full, a time to follow the breathing, or sense our bodies, or both. A time to visualize a lotus, or imagine sending love to everyone in the world, or to pray for the well being of some other person, a person we deeply care about, or people we don’t even know.

Prayer, mediation, contemplation, reverie, chilling, all are terms that surely could be defined and distinguished one from the other. Not necessary here. This isn’t a scholarly treatise, this is a field map to being present, to being happy, to living a more full, rich and useful life.

Meditation is a path for everyone to explore, and for many, a daily excuse to be quiet, or opportunity to go deeper inside, or a lifesaver from the pressures and hurries of the “outside” world.

Whatever mediation turns out to be for you, even an activity you don’t especially care to pursue, give yourself, today at least, a chance or two to take it for a test drive.


Sit with your eyes closed in a comfortably upright position. Arch and round a bit to find a good upright. Have your belly soft and a little forward, your back slightly arched.

Breathe.

When thoughts come, attempt to watch them as What Is.

If you begin to have reactions to the thoughts, feel how that stirs up the works, and come back to simply following your breathing. Maybe add on sensing your body. Maybe not.

95: What others do, and our reaction to “it” another way around: 3 kinds of business

What others do, and our reaction to “it” another way around: 3 kinds of business

What brains do best is learn. They learn by making distinctions, noticing differences, being aware of ways that reality is not the same, ways that this apple tastes different than that pear, or this book makes us feel different than that movie, or this person enriches our life and that person not so much.

The Byron Katie work takes advantage of this, this using of the mind to heal our lives by inquiring into our own thinking, and to undermine the mind’s tendency to drive us into bad and unhappy and often even miserable feelings.

We’ve seen how the four questions is using the mind to ask and search instead of just being a victim to the average and often very unsatisfactory ways of thinking about and reacting to things.

Byron Katie helps get question three clear by sometimes making these distinctions: my business, your business, God’s business.

Earthquakes and big storms: God’s business.

Other people do what they do. Say what they say. Feel how they feel. Their business.

We react to this. Our business, our reaction,

We have ideas and thoughts and rules and opinions about what they do or say. These ideas and thoughts and rules and opinions and the consequent unpleasant feelings: this is our business.

What they do or say is What Is. It’s what they do or say.

But, when we really, really think they “shouldn’t” then we go inside ourselves and have the kind of reactions that question three helps us get clear.

Think about this.

A lot.


Someone does something.

That’s just What Is. It’s their business. Their path. Their life.



And when we make it our business to think it should be different, we have the list of consequences we get when we write our list for question three.

They act.

We react as a victim or a counter-attacker. We suffer.

And is that to say, we SHOULDN’T feel bad?

Nah, we can feel all we want, but once we stop believing our reactions, we can start to see the pain and confusion that the other person is almost surely suffering. Then we can feel for them, instead of just getting defensive.

By staying in our own business, we might actually be able to be of use to the formerly aggravation / infuriating “other.”

So enjoy your day and see when any and all unhappiness derives from being in someone else’s business and discover if coming back to your own business brings relief and happiness.

94: Question 3 again: How do I make Hell for Me?

The Work of Byron Katie, Question Three, again: the consequences. How do I react and how do I live when I attach to the thought/ belief/ story that…?

Take some person who has been bugging you. Write a couple of shoulds or shouldn’ts about them. Then ask questions one (Is it true?) and two (Can I absolutely know that it is true?), and then add question three. How do you react and live when you attach to the thought?

You’ve done this before.

And many a wise or semi-wise person has said something to the effect of: “It’s not the thing that happens, it’s your reaction to the thing that matters in your life and your emotional well being.”

So once more, pen or pencil in hand, write down this question #3 laundry list of what happens to you when you believe in, when you indulge in, when you take as truth and reality the thought.

Write the list down. Writing slows. Writing helps us see it rather than just “feel” it. Writing clues us into the how the piling up of one bad feeling and attitude and behavior can come from the attachment to the simplest of thoughts.

The list is a big set of possible ways of being bummed out by our reaction to life.

It will include feelings.

It will include physical states.

It will include behavior patterns.

It will include how you do or want to treat the other.


Let’s take an example: So and so shouldn’t be so critical.

You imagine them being critical and write what happens: maybe like this: I get scared. I get angry. I want to run away. I want to attack. I bad mouth them to others. I feel small. I feel like a child again. I lecture them. I am critical of their criticalness. I feel tight and hard to breathe inside. I give them “the look” when they come near me. I cringe when someone mentions their name. I avoid events that I know they will be at. I wonder what I “did wrong.” I obsess about what they are “doing wrong.”

And so on.

Let the list get so long and top heavy that it begin, almost, to crumble, of its own accord.

Good.

93: Upload your life: arch and round and twist with awareness, then do the Thich Nhat Hahn Meditation

Mind and body and learning: rounding and arching in sitting, with a twist.

Sit in a chair or on a log, or bench, near the front so both feet can be on the ground, and your back is not leaning on anything.

Interlace your hands and put them behind your head, and in this position, do the arching and rounding we have described several times. Do this for a bunch of pleasant and aware and waking and learning times.

Sometimes have your eyes going the way your head is going. Sometimes the opposite.

Go slowly.

Know how you are breathing.

Feel really good.

Rest.


Now try this, when you round, bring your elbows forward, as if they want to touch or straddle your knees. When you arch, widen your elbows out, and one time twist to the right and up with your right elbow, following it with your eyes. Then bring elbows forward, come down, round, and breathe out. Then go to the left, breathe out again (you figure that one out), push your belly out, and lift your left elbow up and backwards, feeling your whole back involved.

Do this a number of times.

Go slowly.

Feel the whole shifting that is going on in your spine.

Enjoy this.

For the rest of the day, simple be present to breathing and to being in your body. You might want to try a famous Thich Nhat Hahn meditation: breathing in, I sense my body; breathing out I smile.

This is a good one, and today, and do sense your spine when you sense your body.

92: But I don't want to forgive. Ah, to be human and stuck, welcome to the LIfe on Earth show

But I don’t want to forgive

Don’t. Until it happens not by decision but by ease.

You have someone bothering you. Oh, well.

Keep playing with question #3 and question #4 (of the Byron Katie work): Who are you and how do you react and how do you feel when you believe and attach to the thought?

(Can almost all the inner agony thoughts be boiled down to a “should” or “shouldn’t” thought? Yes.)

Compare and distinguish who you are and how you feel when you don’t believe the thought, don’t attach to it, don’t “buy into” the “should” or the “shouldn’t” about the other person.

Just go back and forth and realize the choice is yours.

It’s not about “forgiving.”

It’s about choosing where to put our attention: on the “should” or “shouldn’t” we attach to another person, or on the present where we can experience our experience right now.

Without words.

Even if the “bad” other person is right in the room, snarling at us. We can just look. No “they shouldn’t snarl” words.

They can be yelling at us. We can step farther away, so as not to hurt our ears, and watch them go through whatever they are going through.

Obviously something is bothering them.

Maybe we hurt their feelings. Maybe they don’t feel loved. Maybe they have old issues they are acting out.

Doesn’t matter. Just watch, and if it looks like they need a hug, ask if they’d like one. If it looks like they need an enemy, and you don’t feel like being yelled at anymore, bow and walk out and go do something else.

They are who they are.

It’s not forgiveness that matters. It’s the freedom to follow our breathing, and sense ourselves and look at them without demands or complaints, the freedom to be a real human being. This is what matters. Keep up living this way, today.

day 91: Go Inside, wake up to Loving the "enemy"

Peaceful "interior" of a different sort. Photo by my daughter, paintings by my son's ex-gal

Go inside, be happy, and if not….do the Work

My Christian friend, Dick Staub, offers Jesus as the way to find our lives centered in love. He and I agree a lot that one center of a real, authentic and full life, is the ability to “love your enemies.” The heart, our heart, is the heart of the matter. And our heart, holding onto any little bit of a grudge, can't love the way a heart so loves to do (and be).

Another way this could be said, is to feel good toward, and treat well, people who don’t necessarily feel go toward you, nor necessarily treat you well.

So here’s today’s project: go inside and let your mind touch, with love, those people who “bother” you the most.

Don’t struggle.

Don’t wish them to be different.

Don’t take their treatment of you personally.

Either see them with the love Jesus would, or use the help, as you know it, of Jesus, to get you to a place of love and appreciation and enjoyment of these people.

Or use the Work of Byron Katie, if you need to come to inner peace that way, or find it useful. Indeed, you could be a fine Christian, and take advantage of the four questions and the turn around to help you return to the place Jesus wants us all to live.

Either way, go inside, let your mind roam freely, and then come to the place where you can smile about the stuff that bothers most people.

This is only a life time’s work, this little section today, and a life is composed of days, and today is a day, so enjoy many times of doing little except going within and finding peace.

And making this a peace that gets work, by letting your thoughts wander the to “troubling” people, over and over, until there is no “trouble” left.

Play with, and work with this dilemma and challenge and gift of our life on Earth: other people are jerks sometimes. We are jerks sometimes.

We can be present and we can find a way to see them as the same as us and love them. This is the inner game for today.